Tag: police abuse

"Roma are not a single, homogeneous category. We are women, men, children, Muslims, Christians, lesbians, gay men, straight people, some of us have disabilities. Antigypsyism interacts with misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and other ideologies of hate in complicated ways. We continue to fight injustice at all these intersections, and want courts to deliver judgments that take account of these complex and multiple forms of oppression against our people.”

Despite Romania’s miserable rankings statistics on many poverty and social exclusion indicators, Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, found that “Many Romanian officials are in denial about the extent of poverty and especially about the systemic and deep-rooted discrimination against the extremely poor, particularly the Roma, as illustrated by cases of forced evictions and police abuse.”

In the mid-nineteenth century in his Histoire de France, Jules Michelet wrote that France is “the moral ideal of the world” and ruminated that “no doubt every great nation represents an idea important to the human race. But great God! How much more true this is of France.” France’s long cherished self-image as the source of enlightenment, a republic where history is glorious and reason reigns supreme, has taken something of a thrashing since 2010, not least due to the publicity generated by its treatment of Roma.

In 2008, the declaration of a State of Emergency to combat the so-called ‘Roma menace’, prompted global media coverage and international criticism. The demonisation of Romani people in this overtly racist and populist get-tough approach served only to exacerbate communal tensions, legitimise human rights abuses, and seriously damage prospects for social inclusion. A quick perusal of ERRC’s archives between 1997 and 2000 reveals that all of this was foreseeable, preventable, and utterly unnecessary.